How do you transcribe an interview on a Mac?

Record it, or import what you have

An interview reaches your Mac one of two ways. If it happened over a call, you can record it live from your Mac, capturing your questions and the other person’s answers. If you already recorded it, on a phone, a handheld recorder, or another app, you import the file and transcribe that.

Either way, doing the transcription on-device keeps the interview private. Interviews are often under embargo, off the record, or simply not yours to hand to a cloud service, so a tool that works locally is the sensible default.

Keep the speakers apart

The thing that separates a usable interview transcript from a frustrating one is knowing who said what. If both voices are mashed into a single track, you get a wall of text where your questions and their answers blur together, and attributing a quote means listening back to check.

Recording each side on its own track solves this. Your voice and the interviewee’s stay separate, so the transcript can attribute each line correctly. A tool that then lets you label the speakers, so you name each voice once after the interview, gives you a transcript you can quote from directly.

Working with the transcript

A good transcript carries timestamps. That matters for interviews, because before you publish a quote you will want to hear it in context, and a timestamp takes you straight there rather than scrubbing through the audio.

From there the transcript is plain text you can search, copy quotes from, or drop into your writing tool. If the interview was long, an on-device summary can give you a map of what was covered before you dig into the detail.

Before you record

Interviews carry the same consent questions as any recording, and often more, since you may intend to publish. Make sure the interviewee knows they are being recorded, agree what is on and off the record, and check the recording rules that apply where you both are.